iContact API Challenge Winners

Email marketing service iContact announced the winners of their API Challenge, a contest for partners and customers of iContact that asked them to build an integration between third party applications and iContact.

The 1st place winner, who was given a cash prize of $5,000, was James Jeffrey of Mosquito Designs for his Drupal Integration. “I created the iContact module for Drupal to make it easier for users on a Drupal site to subscribe to iContact newsletters,” he explained. The Drupal application integration is also able to manage iContact accounts, client folders and contacts.

2nd place was given to JoomlaShack, a team of designers, developers and technicians in the Joomla community, which came up with J!Contact. They received $2,000 cash. Barrie North, a user and designer of J!Contact explained: “We have been long-time fans of iContact. We built a component called J!Contact that leverages the new iContact API to integrate Joomla registration with iContact, and uses best industry opt-in practices to do so. We also gave it away for free!”

Preation, creators of the Eden Platform, took 3rd place with their iContact event source tool They received $1,000 cash. “Eden Platform is a website optimization system for small businesses,” said Lee Eason, Lead Software Architect for Preation. “Our clients trust us to simplify the process of website maintenance and search engine optimization so that they can do these things entirely on their own. We integrated Eden Platform with iContact so that our customers could see how their email marketing messages affect traffic to their website. By bringing all of this data together in Eden Platform we’re able to provide our customers with this valuable information directly on their website dashboard.”

There were also two honorable mentions in the contest: Email by Designs which created Wumpus Challenge- a play-by-email turn based game and Stephen Eley for his Ruby on Rails Wrapper integration. Each received a $500 cash prize.